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Many thanks @janetteb
I think the water you’re sending well wishes across (much appreciated) is the Tasman Sea. Though I will be crossing Cook Strait in about 10 days (assuming all transport has resumed working normally by then) to rejoin Mrs D, who is still at our daughter’s place in Christchurch. So it’s just me here. I’ve let our next-door neighbours know we’ve got spare room if the stream floods, but it probably won’t get that high.

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Since this seems to be the current discussion area – I just re-watched Asylum of the Daleks. Brilliant episode, the perfect start for Season 7. (I posted some impressions in the forum for that ep).

Outside – 6pm – the winds are starting to pick up. Though not much rain as yet. Going to be an interesting night.

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Impressions of this episode – it’s just packed with lovely lines and quotes. The irony of the Daleks saying “You will save us” to the Doctor is delightful. And the spectacle of the Dalek Parliament is visually marvellous.

“You had a daughter.” Darla: “I know. I’ve read my file.” That is just so sad, and chilling.

“You think hatred is beautiful?” Dalek PM: “Perhaps that is why we have never been able to kill you.” That stings! Score one for the Dalek PM!

And Moff gave us clue after clue that Oswin Oswald was not, could not be who she said she was. But I missed them all first time through because she was such an appealing vivacious – and flirtatious – personality my subconscious didn’t want to admit any doubts. Masterfully done, Moff!

“It’s life. Just life. That thing that goes on when you’re not there.” Amy on her breakup with Rory.

Clue: Where does she get the milk?
Clue: The nanocloud getting to Amy.
AMY: What comes first? How does it [Dalek-isation] start?
DOCTOR: With your mind. Your feelings, your memories, and I’m sorry but it’s started already.
AMY: How do you know?
DOCTOR: Because we’ve had this conversation four times. [Ouch!]

Clue: Oswin never appears on the video link.
Clue: Amy sees a room full of people (that are actually Daleks).

OSWIN: Do you know how you make someone into a Dalek? Subtract love, add anger. Doesn’t she seem a bit too angry to you?
AMY: Well, somebody’s never been to Scotland.

DOCTOR: What about you, though, Oswin. How come you’re okay? Why hasn’t the nanocloud converted you? – that’s lampshading it!

Then Oswin hacks into the Dalek database and deletes all information on the Doctor. That was brilliant.
And the reveal that Oswin was a Dalek all along is so tragic, but beautifully written.

And of course, when the Doctor teleports back into the Dalek Parliament, the Daleks don’t know who he is. Darla gets to say “Doctor – Who?”

Is it just my faulty memory, or is the Tardis interior particularly colourful in this episode?

Altogether one of my favourite – and fun – episodes.

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@janetteb @thane16 @nerys Thanks for the good wishes. At the moment it’s calm outside, with periods of gusts and some rain. According to the weather map, things will really start happening about dusk. Water – there’s always either too much or too little of it. I’ve done what minor things I can (checked the drains, put any loose things inside the garage) so now is a good time to sit tight and watch Doctor Who. 🙂

@janetteb I think I agree with all the points you made. Except that I didn’t notice Graham telling the Doctor what to do (maybe he was, I just didn’t notice). What I did resent was the Doctor ordering Graham not to kill the toothy villain at the end of series 1. And yes he started well but got a bit tiring, over time.

Yaz was definitely the best of 13’s companions. Dan was good too. But three companions was too many, it diffused the inter-personal drama too much.

I liked Yaz’s family. I would have liked to see more of them. And, ‘Eve of the Daleks’ was very nicely written. So, Chibnall could on occasion get it right. Just a pity that he got carried away so often by a temptation to turn it up to 11. The Flux being a case in point – really the most effective episode of that series was the Weeping Angels one, where the scene of action was brought back down to that one village. And Fugitive of the Judoon was quite good, the character of Doctor Ruth (who had a nice ruthless streak) was intriguing. Though I never did work out how she related to the ongoing Doctor dynasty.

And I never warmed to Whitdoc. She started off with an annoying tendency to go all dithery and yet, talk down to people, and even after three seasons she still did that. Somehow, when previous Doctors slipped in references to knowing Cleopatra or whoever, I found it amusing; when Whitdoc did it, or knew all the answers, it just came across as smart-ass and annoying. Was I prejudiced? I don’t think it was because she was female, I loved Missy, and I liked all the female Companions (except Donna) and never fretted when they carried as much weight story-wise as the Doctor did. When Rose looked into the time vortex and gained the power to destroy all the Daleks – that was thrilling.

I don’t think Chibnall had Moff’s deft touch in writing dialogue and characters. For example, Clara’s attempt to ‘civilize’ Capdoc with her little prompt cards (which of course the Doc got tragically, hilariously wrong – “Condolences on the loss of your relative/significant other/pet”). Often, with the Moff, it’s what was implied that counted. For example when Doc asked the General in Hell Bent “How many regenerations?” He and the General knew what that meant, by the time the audience realised it, he’d shot the General. All the dialogue in Moff episodes was polished and carried weight, none of it was banal. ‘Charm’, as janetteb and nerys said.

Incidentally, last night looking through my DVD’s I picked out ‘Local Hero’ which (and I’d completely forgotten) featured a very young Peter Capaldi. I almost didn’t recognise him. He’s one actor who has definitely acquired more character with age. (I think John Hurt is another).

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@thane16 Thanks! According to the weather map, things don’t get really dramatic until tomorrow night. Gabrielle is moving very slowly and giving us the benefit of her company for much longer than we would like. But of course a slight change in course can change things dramatically. And as cyclones go, it’s ‘only’ a Category 2 – all very dramatic for us, but we never get *real* cyclones here.

I’ll report back tomorrow or the day after.

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Hi @janetteb @nerys @thane16

Well there’s a lot to unpack there. My favourite Tardis (by a mile) was Capaldi’s, very elegant and spacious. And also, I think, kind to the actors and directors – they always had somewhere interesting to walk or stand while delivering their lines. I’ve seen the pic of the new one and it does have a ramp to walk down, but other than that the actors’ space seems rather constricted.

I did like the Master in the Aussie scenes (which was quite creditable since he had to follow Missy) but I think he went a bit OTT after that. But I can’t quite clearly recall the later Whitdoc seasons, too much stuff going on I think. Of course Capaldi was my favourite Doc, followed by Smith, (and that includes their respective companions too. Oh, and Rose). Yes that Garda story – what was that about?

‘Eve of the Daleks’ – that was the ‘bottle’ show set in a warehouse, wasn’t it? Yes, that was really good. Often ‘bottle’ shows are some of the best, they allow (force?) the writers to concentrate on the interactions between a few people, and if the cast have good chemistry then it really has some impact. (Such as ‘The Girl Who Waited’ that I just re-watched).

I’m really just filling in time, listening to the calm outside – well, it’s mostly calm, with occasional little flurries of wind. We’re waiting for Cyclone Gabrielle to arrive. (I could have been said to be a Xena fan once, but I was never a Gabfan 🙂 Said to be the worst cyclone to hit NZ since Bola in 1988, but that one just hit East Cape, so this will be the worst to hit Auckland – ever? And after we got the incredible three-times-the-all-time-record rain two weeks ago, it’s a case of oh, no, not *again*. Though that one didn’t come with any wind, and this is a cyclone. Personally, I’m more worried about the wind than the rain, though my next-door neighbours who live beside the stream are probably the other way round. One of them has his car parked (by invitation) in our driveway which is hopefully above flood level.

I’ve got my chainsaw assembled (in case of trees) and I’ve just thought of a couple of drains I should go and clear, before the rain starts…

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I have to admit LOTR still does nothing for me. Just 5 minutes longer than Once Upon a Time in the West but it seemed much longer. I think there were too many characters and too much stuff going on, and hobbits are annoying. And somehow, the heroes seem so utterly outnumbered at every stage that it’s hard to credit them surviving, so that reduces credibility.

I’ve never read Tolstoy (or Dostoevksy either). I’m afraid I used to find the ‘classics’ assigned to us at school, rather hard going. Except for Shakespeare, Shakespeare understood Moffat’s dictum of ‘you need to have something happen every few minutes to keep the audience engaged’. (Except Hamlet, he was all talk and no action – ‘get on with it, kill somebody’. Bloodthirsty kid, I must have been).
I was a compulsive reader, would read anything, but I preferred (some) popular stuff like Arthur C Clark, John Wyndham, even Arthur Conan Doyle, and of course Doug Adams later on.

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Hi syzygy @thane16 I read ‘Longitude’ a while ago, it was largely about a clockmaker (Harrison – I just had to google that). As I dimly recall, though, it didn’t go into a lot of detail about how he managed to achieve super-accurate timekeeping (I could be wrong about that though).

I’ve just paused my intermittent re-watch at the end of Season 6 to view some movies. I was prompted (by a Youtube video) to re-watch Once Upon a Time in The West, Sergio Leone’s ultimate spaghetti western, and still my favourite. Surprisingly, because it’s very leisurely and requires a relaxed approach and I wasn’t feeling particularly relaxed – surprisingly, as soon as the ten-minute nothing-happening title sequence started, it just ‘clicked’ with me and I enjoyed the whole movie better (including Ennio Morricone’s haunting score) than ever before. I’ve found my enjoyment of movies or episodes very often depends on the mood I’m in, but I can never predict it.

Now I’m going to try Lord of the Rings (the original movie), I couldn’t see anything in it first time around, I’ll see if it’s improved with age or a 55″ TV screen…

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@winstone I’m sorry to hear of your loss. As @blenkinsopthebrave noted, many of us are at the age where people around us keep dying. It’s disconcerting and rather sad. In my case, my relatives back in England are not so numerous now… of course there’s a younger generation but that’s not quite the same thing. I’m not sending quite so many calendars at Christmas as I used to. If Mrs D and I are going to go visit the rellies once more post-Covid, I’d better pull my finger out and book something soon.

Enough of that, it will be interesting to see Ten again in the Doctor role, and how they’re going to handle it, plot-wise. Flashbacks? (Is there such a thing in Time Lord universe? And how do we measure it?)

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Hi @janetteb Yes, I’m fine, thanks, and lucky enough to live on a moderate slope so safe from the numerous slips, also just far enough above the valley bottom to be above flood level.
Blockhouse Bay, where I had a nice paddle at high tide today, the overflowing stream has carved a wide gully in the little sandy beach and spread it across the mudflats below – nice for paddling, though doubtless the Council will lament the loss of their beach sand; inversely Piha, where I tried swimming yesterday, the sand bottom was covered in waterlogged sticks and debris – hopefully the tide will clear those fairly quickly. But everywhere has been affected by the extreme weather. I think if you added up all the flood damage, landslides and washouts of the past month, it would equate to a medium-sized earthquake.

I think almost everybody here in this forum has experienced really extreme weather in the last year or two.

This forum is very quiet at the moment, I too hope it’s not because everyone is too busy battling disasters to post.

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Hi @doctorines Your English is a lot better than my French!

But there’s an awful lot to say about the Tardis…

The Tardis – there’s a Wikipedia page on it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TARDIS
that gives quite a lot of detail.
There’s also an excellent site at tardis.fandom.com that is full of information on every Doctor Who episode and character *except*, ironically, the Tardis. But probably far too much to easily digest.

Here’s a site that lists all the Tardis interiors: https://thedoctorwhosite.co.uk/tardis/interior/

(the exterior always looks pretty much the same, it takes a real expert to tell which vintage any given Tardis exterior is from)

To summarise – the Tardis is a time machine. The Time Lords of Gallifrey had a lot of Tardises but the one in the series is a Type 40 that the Doctor stole (or the Tardis ‘chose’ the Doctor and manipulated him into stealing it). It has some sort of psychic link with the Doctor, which is possibly why it often reconfigures its control room completely when the Doctor ‘regenerates’. It is conscious and intelligent.

Quite often, the Tardis’s time-navigation is a bit inaccurate, sometimes arriving days or years before or after the intended date. Some times deliberately – Doctor: You didn’t always take me where I wanted to go. Tardis: No, but I always took you where you needed to go. (‘The Doctor’s Wife’)
It is, famously, ‘bigger on the inside’. Nobody knows (because the show hasn’t said) just how big it is. And it looks like a 1960’s police telephone box because its ‘chameleon circuit’ is stuck.

The Tardis’s power source – well, I’m a bit unsure of that. It’s something like a contained supernova or some equally unimaginable power, if it got loose it could destroy the Universe. Or something.

The Tardis has a ‘translation circuit’ which seems to extend to anywhere its crew go, which translates everything into English. (This seems to be essential in Scifi series, for obvious reasons).

The Doctor can drive it, but he’s not a very good driver (the funny whoosh-whoosh noise in because he leaves the handbrake on). River Song can drive it much better, but then she was conceived in the Tardis and it taught her how to drive it. The Tardis is almost impossible to damage or break into from outside, however it can be ‘imprisoned’, teleported (I think), picked up by a helicopter, etc.

Other Tardises do exist in the series, for example in ‘Hell Bent’ the Doctor and Clara stole another Tardis from Gallifrey billions of years in the future, and it is now flying around disguised as an American Diner (or some other object, its chameleon circuit is probably still working) in the possession of Clara and Ashildr/Me.

Apologies if you already knew all that.

Plenty more where that came from, but I hope that gives you a few talking points?
Bonne chance!

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@tawnyowl38 I don’t mean that in a bad way. You’ve got 12 or so seasons yet to view before you run out of new episodes, so that’s a good thing I guess. But for me to be in your position, I’d have to forget all the episodes I’ve seen, and I wouldn’t want to do that. So which of us is the more fortunate? (I don’t think there’s an answer to that).

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@janetteb Thanks. Our house is ‘one section away’ from the little local stream, on rising ground, so we’re fairly safe from floodwaters. Our neighbours nearer the stream got their garages / basements flooded though.
What we do get is surface runoff from the sections above, at one point yesterday it was coming through a gap in the fence like a little waterfall. But following a storm decades ago where the water got under the bottom of our house wall into the basement (it’s a timber weatherboard house with just a fibrolite ‘skirt’ to ground level) we’ve built up a narrow garden around the uphill sides of the house which acts as a dam to deflect the water around it.

But this has been an ‘extreme’ event that has flooded places that were never expected to flood. All the pipes and stream channels have just been swamped.

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Hi Tawny @tawnyowl38
Season 1 – that’d be S1 of New Who I take it? (Also known as ‘After Gap’ or ‘AG’ Who, as opposed to ‘Before Gap’). The Season with Rose Tyler and Chris Eccleston as the Doctor?
You’ve got a good long way to go, I almost envy you.
You may need to beware of ‘spoilers’, we’re supposed not to post them without warning but of course we sometimes lapse.
I think you’re quite young compared with (most of us) oldies, I recognise Fleetwood Mac and Dire Straits. Your taste in movies is fairly ‘dark’, Lock Stock & 2 Smoking Barrels is a good black comedy.
Anyway, welcome to the forum.

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Just skipped over Night Terrors and The God Complex and Closing Time (not that they’re bad episodes, as such) and got straight to The Wedding of River Song. Which was just fan-tastic. And just sheer fun. I’ve posted more in the relevant forum.

In real life – just had the heaviest rain I ever remember, big areas of West Auckland flooded. Auckland Airport got more rain in four hours yesterday afternoon (171mm) than the previous 24-hour record. Weather cleared for a while today and I went down to the little beach for a swim, there was a huge gully (made by floodwaters) in the sand at the back of the beach and a deep pool at the end of it (made a nice swimming hole) and the muddy flat bottom off the beach is now a sandy flat for about 100 yards. Our house survived undamaged except for a pebble garden at the back half of which ended up in the carport. More rain forecast for tonight but so far (it’s 1.30 a.m.) no sign of it. It’s out there somewhere, lurking.

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This is *fun*. That train coming out of the Gherkin, the engine is French – the cab windows are quite distinctive. (This would be a nitpick but compared with the other insanity going on, it fades into insignificance). Pterodactyls in Hyde Park. Holy Roman Emperor Churchill. I’ll bet the Moff loved writing this incredible fantasy.

So then this is all the Doctor/soothsayer telling the story to Churchill, with Silents lurking (as witnessed by the tick marks on the Doctor’s arm)

The scene in the bar is just so cool, and the Doctor is so badass. Plunks a Dalek eyestalk down on the bar. Lovely to see the Teselecta again. “There are no rats in the transept. The skulls eat them.” Carnivorous skulls eating the villainous Gantok – the Moff was enjoying himself altogether too much.

And then the Doctor gets out the blue envelopes. Why the Teselecta crew agree to deliver them I don’t know, but they seem to have a high degree of goodwill towards the Doctor.

Flashback to Lake Silencio. But this time we see who is in the astronaut suit – it’s River. And she subverts the ‘fixed point in time’ by deliberately missing the Doctor – but that causes Time to collapse.

… and now the Doc has four tick marks on his arm. “Don’t panic. In small numbers they’re not too difficult” – and now there are 75…

– and in walks Amy with a troop of ?Unit? operatives. She looks cool with the eyepatch, by the way.

The Great Pyramid, Area 52. Gotta laugh.

The eyepatches are ‘eyedrives’ which can remember the Silents and communicate with the brain. This will be significant later.

The Doctor and River comparing notes on Cleopatra is a hoot. And Madam Kovarian despondently looking on.

So the Silents have broken out of their tanks (as they planned) and the eyedrives are starting to electrocute their wearers – including Madam Kovarian.

Loved the sudden reappearance of Amy with submachine gun. And her response to Madame Kovarian asking her to take her eyepatch off –
KOVARIAN: But you’ll still save me, though. Because he would, and you’d never do anything to disappoint your precious Doctor.
AMY: The Doctor is very precious to me, you’re right. But do you know what else he is, Madame Kovarian? Not here.
(Amy puts Kovarian’s eye drive back in place.)
AMY: River Song didn’t get it all from you, sweetie. [Ouch!]

Amy has got very economical in her interaction with Rory.
AMY: So, you and me, we should get a drink some time. RORY: Okay. AMY: And married. RORY: Fine.

and later
RORY: I’m not sure I completely understand. AMY: We got married and had a kid and that’s her. RORY: Okay.

Rory in this timeline is obviously completely out of his depth and just happy to go along with everything.

So anyway, the Doctor’s killing was faked with the aid of the Teselecta.

Altogether a throughly enjoyable episode, with never a dull moment. The Moff at his best.

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(I see the last two posts were by me. What the heck, I wrote this and it doesn’t exactly copy what is aid before, so I’ll post it…)

At the start, this seemed like a light and entertaining adventure. Was that ever wrong.

The first reveal of Old Amy is startling and the most sensational bit of aging I’ve ever seen. The makeup artists should get an Oscar. And so should Karen, for playing the bitter hardened Old Amy with such conviction. The moment Rory and Amy share a laugh over a fez, showing Old Amy softening up a little, is magic.

But where did she get a katana sword? I guess if she could make a sonic screwdriver she could locate a katana somewhere (museum exhibit?)

Old Amy refusing to wind the clock back is, in some way, understandable. But is Rory being a bit hypocritical in demanding to get Young Amy back? But then (virtual?) Young Amy materialises. The contrast of the two seen side by side in the spyglass is stunning. The scene of the two Amy’s comparing memories and warming to each other has been done a hundred times but rarely better than this.

I actually feel a bit sad for Robot Rory, abandoned in Twin Streams.

So then Old Amy demands to come along with Rory and Young Amy and the Doctor reluctantly agrees it could work.

The moment when Rory meets Young Amy again in the flesh and Old Amy stands there like a wallflower is just perfectly done.

I feel almost sorry for the handbots, with Old Amy massacring them. I instinctively wonder why they’re all such easy prey, but of course they weren’t designed to counter armed opposition.

So then Rory carries Young Amy into the Tardis – and the Doctor shuts the door on Old Amy. This was shocking and the most tragic moment, I think, in all of Doctor Who. The Doctor was lying like a bastard when he said it could work (but what else could he have done at that point?) And then the Doctor leaves Rory to decide whether to let Old Amy in. But it’s an impossible decision.

I was trying to figure out why two Amy’s were impossible when there have been two (or more) Doctors in the Tardis on many occasions. And I think the difference is this – that on those occasions the Doctor’s timeline brought him back naturally to the same point. Whereas Old Amy only existed *because* they failed to rescue Young Amy. As soon as Rory carried Young Amy back into the Tardis, Old Amy became an impossibility.

One of the most moving episodes in all of Who. And it was a ‘bottle’ episode, like Blink and Midnight. Frequently, I think, the limited cast of such episodes lends itself to more intense emotion.

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@janetteb Good point, it’s hard to feel a lot of empathy for the characters. I think part of this may be the difficulty of being sure whether at any moment we’re watching the ‘original’ or the ‘copy’, which is a problem inherent in the premise of the episode. And also, of course, the humans show little empathy for their clones. And (maybe this is just me) when there are similar characters, I find it hard to tell them apart – in this case there were three male humans (plus their clones). I actually felt a lot more empathy for Lorna from the Gamma Forests in A Good Man Goes to War.

Kudos to the Moff for not milking the sympathy for clone-Amy when the Doc zaps ‘her’, shocking though it seems. That would have been inappropriate since Amy’s consciousness was being ‘beamed in’ from Demon’s Run. (Though the nominal episode writer was Matthew Graham, I’m certain that bit was down to the Moff).

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To belatedly answer @davros query from 2020 – how Rory & Amy got back to Earth from Demon’s Run – at the end of that ep the Doctor said “River, get them all home”. Quite how River did that is unspecified (but then, ditto for how she got to Demon’s Run). This is a woman who treats Stormcage as her own personal crash pad, so I guess she could arrange it.

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Thoughts on a second viewing (18 months later) –

I do love the concept of Amy and Rory using ‘cereal art’ (crop circles) to summon the Doctor, though I have an insurmountable caveat about the method. A Mini would not flatten the wheatstalks adequately (as can be seen in one shot in the episode itself), you need a plank to press them down as developed by Doug and Dave. Still, love the concept – and of course River has to upstage them with a stolen Corvette.

Personally, I like the flashbacks to Mel’s growing up with Amy. Okay, we should have seen mention of her before, but I can rationalise why we didn’t – did we see any other of Amy’s friends? Mels wasn’t at the wedding but the Moff tackled that head-on and lampshaded it, Mels doesn’t ‘do’ weddings. And I really liked that Mels had to point out to Amy that Rory was crazy about her – now that was entirely compatible with what we knew of Rory and Amy, I think.

And I love the Teselecta to bits. The Moff has a genius for making the crew’s chat amusing. The way the Teselecta morphs in a pixel-ish way is very reminiscent of the blue shapeshifter Mystique in X-Men, actually more intriguing than the other alternative which is ‘flowing’ like the T-1000 Terminator.I’m not sure why it needs the jellyfish, um, antibodies but they’re incredibly cool. As is their dialogue – “Welcome. You are unauthorised. Your death will now be implemented. You will experience a tingling sensation and then death. Remain calm while your life is extracted.”

Hitler is a very good likeness. I like the scene in his office, fun for one and all. And Rory gets to punch Hitler. Who just shot Mels. Meanwhile the teselecta crew have identified the Tardis as stolen – and found an even bigger target than Hitler, ‘her’. That is to say, Mels – who turns out to be Melody, who just regenerated into River Song. There is just so much going on in this episode!

And Rory gets to punch the Teselecta, and he and Amy ride off in pursuit of River, with the Teselecta in pursuit of them. But now the Teselecta is imitating Amy? Oh, to sneak up on River, having absorbed Rory and Amy – who meet the Antibodies. “Please cooperate in your officially sanctioned termination. It is normal to experience fear during your incineration.” How reassuring, what’s not to like?

And I love the scene where the Doctor is analyzing the Teselecta.

“Silence will fall when the qustion is asked.” “What is the question?” “Unknown.” (But is the answer 42? – shades of Hitchhiker’s Guide).

“Only two lifeforms remain. This will be rectified” – the Antibodies again. And River can fly the Tardis (better than the Doctor, apparently). And of course, now we know why.

But the Doctor just died. How is he getting out of that? River sacrifices her regeneration energy to revive him. I didn’t know she could do that.

A thoroughly enjoyable episode, full of entertaining moments, even the serious ones.

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– and I’m back to my Doctor Who collection, after a month. Last night I watched The Rebel Flesh/ The Almost People. A so-so episode (I posted a brief comment in the relevant forum, my post was #7 and the first for nine years, which kinda shows how much interest/controversy the episode had).

The most striking bit of course was the ‘sting in the tail’ – the reveal that Amy was a doppelganger. Who the Doctor promptly zapped.

Sci-fi (and fantasy) loves doppelgangers, clones, impersonations and ‘skin jobs’, none more than Doctor Who. Just thinking, there’s the Flesh Doctor and Amy in this ep. There’s the Tesseract impersonating people in Let’s Kill Hitler. There’s the two Amy’s in The Girl Who Waited. There’s Darla and Bors (Dalek ‘skin jobs’) in Asylum of the Daleks and The Magician’s Apprentice. There’s Prisoner Zero in The Eleventh Hour. There’s Heather in The Pilot. There’s the Autons and the Zygons. There’s – oh I give up, they’re all over the place.

Anyway, A Good Man Goes to War next.

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Wow, am I the first person to feel inclined to comment on this double episode in nine years? And I’m only comment #7…

Actually, I guess that says it all, really. Not a terrible episode, just enough happening to keep me watching, I have a feeling it could almost have been cut down to a single episode without losing much.

The two Doctors being swapped was quite effective but I don’t think there was any foreshadowing that would have let us deduce it before the reveal, so that detracted slightly. What was a shock, and made watching the whole thing worthwhile, was the reveal that Amy was a doppelganger. (And Rory’s an Auton. What a nice plastic pair they’d make 🙂 I think there were a few clues to Amy – in hindsight, the Tardis detecting her as pregnant/not was an obvious sign that there was something ‘wrong’ with her. But it caught me by surprise. And then the Doctor zapped her! Wow! Didn’t see that coming either.

I assume Amy was grabbed (and copied) in the childrens’ home in Day of the Moon.

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@syzygy Yes, I’ve been in Christchurch for the past month (until yesterday) and the sea temperature (according to the little ‘sea conditions’ sign the life guards put up) has been 17 or 18 degrees the whole time. Now subjectively it seems to me that it’s varied up or down a couple of degrees and their signs have been a little slow to respond, but most of the time it’s been adequately warm, that is to say, ‘warm when in’. Also, most of the time, there’s been a persistent onshore wind, (I see I already moaned about hat) so it’s been warmer in than out.

That said, on my last day there (Saturday), the wind had dropped, it was high tide, good big waves but well spaced, it was lovely, I must have spent half an hour at least hopping around in the waves.

Back in Auckland today, I went down to our tiny local beach – Blockhouse Bay – it was full high tide (so a decent depth of water over the mudflats) and warm enough that I spent an hour paddling around in neck-deep calm water. Probably a couple of degrees warmer than Chch. There was a strong south-west breeze that made the sea very choppy in the Manukau harbour beyond the boatshed on the point, but the ridge that extends to the boatshed shelters the bay perfectly from that direction, just floating around in the little bay you’d never notice how windy and rough it was in the ‘outside world’.

Back to things cinematic, I picked up a DVD of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon at a charity shop in Chch, it wouldn’t play on my laptop, so I watched it last night on our big flatscreen TV – and it needed that. I remember I was commenting on the effects of scenery in Impossible Astronaut and A Town Called Mercy, well it certainly applies to Crouching Tiger. It was much more impressive than I remembered from a couple of decades ago. Also, howcome nobody killed themselves in the spectacular swordfights I’ll never know – I know it’s all stunt work and the swords are plastic but the moves are incredible.

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@janetteb Nice to see a Whoforum post in my mailbox. Yes, the place has been dead quiet. I’m sitting in our daughter’s lounge in New Brighton, Christchurch, a long way away from my Who DVD collection. But the sea’s been fairly warm (slightly warmer than I remember it to be, or at least, I’ve been swimming here every day and in the past it would only have been around 3 times a week, which is probably a more accurate measure than my subjective impression of what it last felt like 2 years ago).

The biggest drawback has been a persistent easterly wind, which often means it’s warmer in the water than out of it (what with the wind chill factor). Constant wind is very annoying. A couple of hundred miles southwest of here, at Middlemarch or Ranfurly in Central Otago, is the windiest place I know, every time I’ve been there there has been a relentless howling gale. I sometimes wonder if there’s a higher incidence of mental illness around those parts. Didn’t Arthur Upfield write a novel in which the murderer had been driven insane by the wind? (‘Winds of Evil’ maybe?) I know how he felt.

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@winston Like JanetteB, I applaud your new years’ resolution. It’s entirely in line with what I think, I’ve always been aware of the energy cost of things. (In kilowatt-hours or similar, not dollars). In the past I got agitated about waste and inefficiency of all sorts. These days I would have said I was getting more tolerant, but I suspect that was just weariness, and tolerance in this case is not a virtue. Something the climate is doing its best to convince us of.

I don’t do resolutions (I promptly forget them) but I’ll try to keep your precepts in mind. It sometimes works.

Cheers, cr

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@thane16 The Silents certainly were frightening monsters. Probably second only to the Angels in the Moff menagerie. They reminded me mostly of Munch’s ‘The Scream’. Where the Angels got a lot of their frighteningness (is that a word? It is now!) from moving when you weren’t looking, the Silents got theirs from their property that you forgot them as soon as you looked away. It takes real writing skill to make the check-marks suddenly appearing on Amy’s hands in the ‘childrens home’ scary.

That south-midWest scenery (I mean the Valley of the Gods / Monument Valley area) is just so spectacular. Worth the budget to go there. As soon as he could afford to shoot a spaghetti western in the US, Sergio Leone shot some of Once Upon a Time in the West there. (Though most of it in Spain, I think not far from A Town Called Mercy). It’s an effective strategy, use that spectacular scenery to ‘spice up’ the rest of the episode.

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@thane16 Apropos of my crack about a modern ‘phone’ being baffling to people from 50 years ago, I’ve just recalled a scene from ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ where Amy was confronted by a Silent in the White House rest room and took a picture of it. Amy exits the rest room and the Secret service guy says “What’s that?” and Amy says “It’s my phone” and I’d expected the guy to say “Phones are not permitted here” and confiscate it, instead he just says “Your phone?” in a puzzled sort of way. It took me AGES to realise that in Nixon’s day, phones were bulky things that sat on desks. And maybe that’s why the Silent let itself be photographed, being habituated to 60’s Earth it didn’t know (or didn’t realise) that Amy was from a time when phones took photos.

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@thane16 Yes, ‘device’ in this context means phone/laptop etc. Notice in aircraft they ask you to turn off your ‘devices’. I think ‘computer thingy’ is a better description – and a ‘phone’ in this context is really a tiny computer that happens to make phone calls. More like a ‘communicator’ really. Just think how baffled people 50 years ago would have been if you’d told them you were watching a movie on your phone. What, the black thing with a dial and wires that comes in a phone box the size of a Tardis?

I can understand the point of doing everything on one ‘phone’, but I tend to have separate gadgets for each function. My laptop(s), a desktop (computer) that these days is really just a fileserver because Mrs D has banished it to my ‘den’ in the basement, I keep gigabytes of stuff on it and use a laptop in the lounge to access it; a digital camera; my smartphone of course; and several little MP3 players. There is a point to the MP3 players, they’re small enough to slip two into a pocket and on a long walk I can use them continuously without worrying about flattening my phone battery. Oh, and my laptops all have DVD drives (except one I fitted with a Bluray drive) so I can sit in the lounge and watch Doctor Who with headphones on while Mrs D watches something brain-cell-numbing on the TV.

Your laptop gets hot because the CPU is consuming power. Intel and AMD and ARM have been working hard for years to get performance up while keeping power drain down. Faster you run it, the hotter it gets, hence gamers and their water-cooled CPUs. I think the CPU in a laptop has far more performance than the miniaturised CPU in a phone, getting decent performance out of that is probably one reason why upmarket phones cost so much. But also why (I think) things tend to run slower on phones than laptops.

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Hi syzygy @thane16 Okay, I must admit I’ve never tried reading this site (or most Internet sites) on a smartphone, I always use a laptop. Warning: Big rambling digression follows. (In fact, up until Covid struck and I needed a ‘device’ that would run the Covid Tracker app – you know, scanning in at the entrances to everywhere – my phone was a little $18 ZTE with push buttons. Amazingly, at that price, it could actually take photos in a good light that were okay to view. But I actually have a proper camera for that anyway. But Internet – not on that phone 🙂

So anything from accessing this site to Youtube to emails, I wait till I’m at home with Internet wifi access. If I need to make contact when I’m not home, it’s phone calls or texts. This seems to be quite different to what most people do. I’ll admit Googlemaps or GPS are likely to be very useful on a phone, but even then Googlemaps is far easier to follow on a full-size screen.

(Texts, on the other hand, are by far the most useful when travelling in the back country with intermittent cellphone contact. A text will go as soon as it ‘sees’ a tower, and your contact will then get it as soon as they come in range of any tower – so you don’t both need to be in range at the same time. This sure beats trying to phone them every time you can get a signal and hoping they just happen to be in range too).

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@thane16 Hi, if I can comment on one thing you mentioned – The Sofa. I don’t know how it shows up on your ‘device’ (what an awful term:) but on my laptop, I never need to load 22 pages. At worst it opens at Page 1 and there’s a little list of pages at the top or bottom of the page and I just click on ’22’ or whatever and it jumps there. Doesn’t that work for you?

Cheers

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Hi @janetteb Thanks! My sojourns in Christchurch (which have been almost an annual thing, except for last year due to Covid) are generally a break – all the multitudinous jobs I have around the home just get put on hold for a month or three. (What usually happens is, Mrs D stays three months, I go back to Auckland for a month in the middle just to mow the lawns and catch the surf at Piha. And after a month of doing very little productive I get restive to do some useful stuff).

I’m hoping your weather is good for the summer. And, noting the date – Merry Christmas!

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@winston That should have been ‘merry and safe Christmas’ of course, I have no idea what ‘maeery’ is. 🙁

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@winston Hello from New Zealand. We’ve seen your winter storms on the news (well, actually, what we’ve seen are USAnian reports, it’s probably fair to assume you’re getting the same weather, only more so). I can only wish you a maeery and safe Christmas.

We (Mrs D and I) are currently in Christchurch, South Island, staying with our daughter & family, we drove down a few days ago. The climate this year has been weird – up in Auckland, I’ve been swimming since September (and normally it never gets warm enough until December). However an unusually mild winter has been followed by a very wet and slightly cool late spring. Here in Chch, we’ve had a stiff Easterly breeze, and everyone’s been waiting for Summer to arrive – finally today we got a sunny day (and at least the sea was warm enough for swimming).

Anyway, I’m currently separated from my Doctor Who DVD collection, so my intermittent re-re-watch will have to pause for a month, though of course I have internet and Youtube to tide me over.

And, @craig, may I join Winston in thanking you for this site that has allowed a scattered cohort of Who aficionados to share their impressions of Who, life, the universe, and everything.

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@oochillyo Oh, and the energy in nuclear / fusion power doesn’t come from ‘nowhere’, it comes from ‘destroying’ (or rather, converting into energy) a minute amount of mass. (In the same way a litre of gasoline ‘produces’ energy by being converted into exhaust gas, though that’s a chemical reaction – so only a very loose analogy).
The energy you get is E=mc^2 – Einstein’s equation. E is energy, m is the mass you just ‘destroyed’, c is the speed of light and in the equation it’s squared – that is a ginormous number.

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@oochillyo Thing is, there’s so much hydrogen around (think: water) and the power produced from a tiny amount of matter is so enormous, it’s ‘virtually’ limitless. Oil would run out soon (even if climate change didn’t force us to stop), coal about ten times longer or something like that (and ditto climate change), nuclear many times longer than that (but waste byproducts are a problem), fusion power – IF it can be made to work – orders of magnitude longer than that. That’s as I understand it.

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@oochillyo Well, in theory, nuclear fusion Hydrogen -> Helium can supply almost unlimited energy for the foreseeable future. It’s what the Sun does, incidentally.

The problem is, starting it and controlling it. It has been achieved experimentally before, but this is the first time they’ve managed to get more energy out than they put in (in the form of laser beams). And since only lightweight atoms are involved there are no radioactive byproducts.

The only other times they’ve achieved nuclear fusion is in H-bombs, which are not generally considered useful.

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Hi @oochillyo

Yes, conservation of energy is a law, so far as I know. Though energy can ‘easily’ be converted from one form (e.g. gravitational potential energy) into another (e.g. kinetic energy), the total energy must remain constant.
There is just one exception – mass can be converted into energy by nuclear processes (and I guess energy can in principle be converted into mass).

What happens in nuclear fusion is, two atoms of hydrogen are fused into one atom of helium. The atom of helium weighs just fractionally less than the two hydrogen atoms did, and the ‘missing’ mass has become energy. The equation is Einstein’s famous E = mc^2. The amount of energy released is absolutely enormous.

In nuclear fission, like a nuclear reactor (or an atom bomb), an atom of a heavy element like U-235 (?) is split into lighter elements; again, the total mass of the products is fractionally less than the original U-235 atoms.

It’s all very simple in principle, the complications arise in finding the right nuclear ‘pathways’ for the reaction to happen and controlling it.

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@winston I remember that as an okay episode. With the Doctor being useless for the first half of it and Rose doing her best to ‘fill in’ for him and bluff the invaders, with mixed results.

Given the aliens’ ruthless approach to killing people (and the Doctor previously being quite prepared to exterminate all the Daleks) I thought it was a bit hypocritical of him to go all moral on Harriet Jones for zapping the departing alien ship.

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One thing I *wish* had been left in – just Listening to Neil Gaiman’s commentary, apparently the scene where the Doc builds a Tardis from scrap – apparently in the original script, he couldn’t find any bits of Tardis, and Idris says that’s because they still have their chameleon circuits on, she switches them off and old washing machines and bits of junk metamorphose into Tardis parts. I would have loved to see that moment.

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I decided to skip Curse of the Black Spot because it’s not really related to the series arc and because pirate stories always seem to bring out the worst in plank-walking, scenery-chewing, cutlass-waving, talk-like-a-pirate-ing (Avast ye landlubbers! Belay the foc’sle!) Only pirate-ship I’ve seen that doesn’t suck was the one in Stardust, with Robert de Niro camping it up as the captain and the crew indulging their captain’s little foibles; written by Neil Gaiman. (Speaking of whom…)

The Doctor’s Wife isn’t really related to the series arc either *but* it’s a cracker!

Is this the first time we’ve heard that Time Lords can change gender? Even if it’s a long-dead one like the Corsair turns out to be?

“What is this place, the scrapyard at the end of the Universe?” – love the Hitch-hiker reference.

Idris is marvellous as the soul of the Tardis. I have to say Auntie and especially Uncle are excellent as well, in their deadpan approach to life and death.

Delightful conversation between Idris and the Doctor as she explains who she is. And I love the way Idris inverts the ‘stole a Tardis’ meme – “Borrowing implies the intention to return the thing that was taken. What makes you think I would ever give you back?”

And the immortal lines “You didn’t always take me where I wanted to go!” “No, but I always took you where you needed to go”

“You ever wonder why I chose you all this years ago?”
“You were unlocked”
“Course I was”

Oh, and this exchange is so delightful I can’t help quoting the whole thing –
IDRIS: I directed him to one of the old control rooms.
DOCTOR: There aren’t any old control rooms. They were all deleted or remodelled.
IDRIS: I archive them, for neatness. I’ve got about thirty now.
DOCTOR: But I’ve only changed the desktop, what, a dozen times?
IDRIS: So far, yes.
DOCTOR: You can’t archive something that hasn’t happened yet.
IDRIS: You can’t.

And another –

AMY: She’s the Tardis?
DOCTOR: And she’s a woman. She’s a woman and she’s the Tardis.
AMY: Did you wish really hard?

And the climactic confrontation in the Tardis control room –
Fear me. I’ve killed hundreds of Time Lords.
DOCTOR: Fear me. I’ve killed all of them.

Altogether a delightful one-off episode, that managed to establish quite a lot of canon without, so far as I know, retconning anything.

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@rewvian Yes I agree about the implied order of meetings. I think River meant it figuratively, and we took it literally. I think, if River and the Doc met in exact reverse order, there would be no point in comparing diaries.

At the time, I thought Nixon was entirely bad. My opinion has softened since. In retrospect, I think he was well-intentioned, but he was let down by his natural combativeness and a certain degree of paranoia about what his ‘enemies’ were plotting.

There was an Americans-with-guns moment on the other side of the coin in Day of the Moon, in the childrens’ home – CANTON: Are you armed? SILENCE: This world is ours. We have ruled it since the wheel and the fire. We have no need of weapons. CANTON: Yeah? (Shoots the Silent.) Welcome to America.

I missed the car on my first watch. Only spotted it this time because there’s one shot by the lake with the gang around the picnic and the Doc’s car head-on in the background – the Edsel had a very distinctive ‘vertical’ grille. I would guess Edsels were quite rare (and probably valuable for the usual paradoxical reasons) by 2011.

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@translatorcircuit

You said “DOCTOR WHO (2005) ENDS
The BBC have confirmed that the revived series of Doctor Who is ending.”

References please? Or I’m inclined to agree with Devilishrobby. I think you’re stating your opinion as if it were fact. And some of those opinions are debatable, to say the least.

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Talk about shock endings, this is a shock start. I thought we would pick up from the warehouse cliffhanger, instead Amy’s running for her life in the desert.

It looks like Canton Delaware has gone over to the evil side, hunting down Amy and Rory and River, and building a cell for the Doctor. But it turns out to be a fortress instead of a cell. And it has the invisible Tardis in it.

The ‘memory markings’ on Amy/Rory/River’s arms to denote Silent sightings are simple, ingenious and – spooky. Like the Silents. “As long as there’s been something in the corner of your eye, or creaking in your house, or breathing under your bed, or voices through a wall.” Thanks, Doctor, I won’t sleep tonight.

The Childrens’ Home is truly traditional classic Frankenstein stuff, with a creepy caretaker and ghostly writing on the walls (in, of course, red) that says “Get out now”. And so does the caretaker’s wrist.

And Amy is trapped in an empty dormitory and when she runs to the window she finds memory markings covering her hands and face. This is truly scary, horrifying stuff. I had forgotten just how scary this episode was or I wouldn’t be watching it alone in the house after midnight.

And Richard Nixon – in this episode – is definitely a Good Guy, rescuing the Doctor from Cape Canaveral security. And, apparently, getting a trip in the Tardis for the occasion.

And who is the child in the home and eyepatch lady? And the photo of Amy and baby?

… and the reason Nixon taped everything was on the Doctor’s instructions, so he’d know if there had been a Silents interaction. What a neat explanation of history, I love that!

I find the logic of Amy being pregnant/not pregnant a bit hard to follow. And the little girl – was she Amy’s baby? If so how? Timey-wimey, I suspect.

But we still don’t have any resolution for the Doc getting shot in Episode 1 in 2011. And there were still one or two Silents around then, since Amy saw one just before the shooting.

So this is one heck of a double-episode to start on, with echoes that – echo – all down the season.

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@rewvian I was thoroughly misled by the suggestion that the Doctor and River met in literal reverse order – which implied that River was somehow moving backwards in time. This, obviously, is impossible, how would they interact? It took me ages to realise it made more sense if they met in random order.

I wasn’t going to make comments as I watched it (done that once before) but the scenic value of Monument Valley got my fingers itching.

Just watched the Prequel. I kind of like it that they didn’t make Nixon all bad. I remember a time when he was regarded as the worst ever (by me included), but – he never invaded Iraq on totally and transparently false pretexts, and – though he lied on occasion, he had sufficient sense of decency and shame to be embarrassed at being caught out. That’s as political as I’m going to get 🙂

They certainly made the most of the scenery – Monument Valley (or wherever it is) is impressive.

“Easter Island – they worshipped you there, have you seen the statues?” Okay, so Smith’s nose is a little on the long side – but trust the Moff to notice that.

My god, the Doc’s car – it’s a Ford Edsel (possibly Ford’s most famous commercial failure). I’d also say it looks hideously over-styled but, frankly, compared with some of the other regrettable styling monstrosities of the period, it’s almost restrained. Made 1958-60 – why does the Doc have such an old car? I don’t think there’s any significance though.

But anyway, there’s something of the atmosphere of a Western about this part of the episode – which I guess is understandable.

So the Astronaut shoots the 1100-year-old Doctor, then in the diner they meet the usual 900-year-old version. So it’s a future Doctor who got shot. (I’m still trying to get my head around this).

Love the whole Oval Office scene. River quietly correcting the Doc’s driving of the Tardis. The reaction of the Secret Service when River makes the Tardis visible. The Doc, casually – “You think you can just shoot me?” River (bursts out of the Tardis) “They’re Americans!” at which the Doc instantly gets his hands up.

And of course, Nixon’s famous tape recorder.

The Silents are second only to the Weeping Angels in scariness.

It took me some minutes to realise why the FBI guard asked Amy what her ‘phone’ was. In 1969 – it’s lucky she wasn’t arrested on sight for possession of a bomb.

In full geek mode, I tried searching for Jefferson, Adams and Hamilton streets in Google Maps, but I couldn’t find such a location. It appears to be fictitious. Too bad.

The Silents in the tunnel are really, really scary. And the way you forget them the instant you look away is as horribly disconcerting as the way the Angels move when you’re not looking.

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So I just re-watched it. Just have a couple of things to add – the spaceship is, I think, the ugliest ever.

As Rewvian said, there are flashes of Moff humour.

If I saw a policewoman looking like Amy I’d burgle something just so she had to arrest me… 🙂

The ‘science’ part – resonating the ice crystals – was pretty thin but at least entirely consistent. And like all the Moff’s plots, the careful attention to detail showed – the fact that the weather machine was keyed to Sardick’s personality so wouldn’t respond after the Doctor had ‘changed’ him was a nice touch, and it gave the perfect excuse for thawing out Abigail for her last day ever.

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I’m not a fan of Dickens or ‘Victorian’ episodes particularly, but this one grew on me. Michael Gambon was excellent as the inhuman ice-cold Sardick. And the singer who charmed the shark was sweet.

And it was a nice reversal when it turned out that Sardick’s reason for keeping Abigail frozen was not some perverse sadistic impulse, but to extend her limited run-time. And the reason hew was such a bastard to everyone else was sadness at losing her – which is not an excuse, but is somewhat of an explanation.

So not a great episode, but a very pleasant, sweet and sad one.

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Well, I agree on Capaldi, Smith and Tennant. And I’d add a couple of Eccleston’s.

Jodie Whittaker – um, Spyfall. Fugitive of the Judoon. Village of the Angels. Eve of the Daleks. Those are the ones I would repeat on a watch-through. But if I were just picking a single episode to re-watch, I don’t think any of them would come to mind. Maybe Eve of the Daleks.

But none of them inspire the joy or emotions I get from watching Blink, or Asylum of the Daleks, or Day of the Doctor, or Hell Bent, or Listen, or The Girl Who Waited, or The Doctor’s Wife, or Magician’s Apprentice/Witch’s Familiar, or Zygon Invasion/Inversion, or Last Christmas, or… I think that’s enough.

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@nerys @devilishrobby Of course the Daleks are *the* canonical Doctor Who villains, instantly recognisable. But for me, the scariest aliens are definitely the Weeping Angels, closely followed by the Silents.
Asylum of the Daleks is one of my favourite episodes, simply because it’s so inventive. The Dalek parliament saying “Save us, Doctor” – that’s a new one. And Darla, the first ever Dalek ‘skin job’ I think. And the Moff manages to produce such casually chilling dialogue like – DOCTOR: You had a daughter.
DARLA: I know. I’ve read my file.
And of course, Oswin Oswald, souffle girl. The Moff kept giving us clues that all might not be well with her (like, where does she get the milk?) but it was still a complete surprise to me when it was revealed she had been converted. Well, maybe not totally a surprise, I had an undercurrent of suspicion at the back of my mind, but it was like a perception filter or a somebody-else’s-problem field, she was such a brilliant character my mind didn’t want to entertain the possibility that she hadn’t survived.
And the nice touch that Oswin erased the Doctor from the Daleks’ memory banks, so when the Doctor teleported back into their Parliament the Daleks didn’t know to shoot him and were reduced to chanting ‘Doctor Who?’
Forgive me rabbiting on, but that’s definitely in my top ten list.

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@jonesygu42
Hi. I don’t know the best place to find episodes (I just use DVD sets), but the best place for a list of all Dr Who episodes is probably Tardis.fandom.com

From the front page, you follow the link TV -> Doctor Who -> Main Episode List
(or I think https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Doctor_Who_television_stories should take you straight there).

This is an exhaustive list of every single episode ever screened, with their screening dates, plus ‘specials’ and ‘webisodes’ and so on. Clicking on any particular episode takes you to a page for that episode with a detailed episode synopsis, cast list etc – it’s a fantastic resource.

My other favourite go-to site is Chrissie’s transcripts site at chakoteya.net, which has a full transcript of the dialogue of every episode – another fantastic resource. (I often have the transcript up on my laptop when viewing an episode, since my hearing seems to be a bit dodgy when there’s background noise going on, it makes it much easier to catch snatches of dialogue that I’ve missed).

HTH

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@winston I have to admit I sometimes talk to animals, though I never get a reply back from them so I guess that’s not really what you were talking about. 🙂
I don’t usually talk to nasty bitey things, though I do have an incurable habit of talking to inanimate objects such as inaccessible bits of car, usually along the lines of “Get in that ***** ***** hole, you **** **** **** bolt!”. After which it usually bites me.
I also credit my car with a personality, such that I apologise profusely to it if I miss a gearchange or hit a pothole.

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